It has come to my attention recently (and you thought that coming to attention was strictly a military thing, right, like armored troop carriers and synthesized, gamma ray-generating 56mm harmonizing laser cannons) that there are a number of you folks out there that are the proud possessors of vaginas; apparently, for many of you, this is standard equipment, so to speak, much like air conditioning and cruise control on automobiles.
Now for some of you, this revelation might beg the following question: "Gee, Pope Guy, given that you're well into your 130s, how did this bit of information escape your notice previously?" My only explanation was that I just wasn't paying attention. (As you might imagine from this, the Pope of the All John All The Time World Church leads a lonely existence. I spend my days in deep contemplation, attempting to understand the world around us, so that I might best lead, as well as serve, my flock of followers.)
You buying into that?
(By the way, for the record, pardon the pun, "Flock Of Followers" was the original name of the Eighties rock band, Flock Of Seagulls, whose lead singer had one of the stupidest-looking hairdos, even by '80s standards, that I ever saw.)
Okay, here's the truth: I've always known about vaginas; I've just never understood them.
And I also don't understand an article I read yesterday about the recent defacing of the statue of Harry Carey that stands outside Wrigley Field in Chicago. For those of you who don't follow major league baseball, Wrigley Field, which, by the way, is the second oldest baseball field in America, only surpassed in age by that horror in Boston, Fenway Park, is the home of the worst sports franchise in the world, the laughable and totally hopeless Chicago Cubs, and Harry Carey was their play-by-play announcer for many years.
Now I imagine at this point, many of you are wondering exactly what vaginas have to do with a statue of Harry Carey and Wrigley Field in Chicago, and the answer is, absolutely nothing; I just needed a good lead-in for my Cubs/Harry's statue story.
Got your attention, didn't it?
According to ESPNChicago, the statue of the iconic Cubs announcer and major lush (the humorist Will Rogers once remarked that he had never met a man he didn't like, which sounds like bullshit to me, but whatever; apparently Harry had the same point of view vis-a-vis beer) was vandalized recently by some brain-dead asshole using white spray paint to emblazon the word "Sox" on the statue, the Chicago White Sox being the other, and much more successful, major league baseball franchise in town. It was also damaged last November when an employee smacked into it with a tractor while preparing the field for a Northwestern University football game, and I don't really get how that happened at all, because the statue is OUTside the stadium, and the field, no surprise, is INside; anyway, it was hinted at in the article that the unnamed employee responsible for damaging the statue had taken Harry's point of view towards imbibing on the job to heart. The difference is that all Harry ever had to do was announce a baseball game when he was hammered; he wasn't operating heavy equipment. (Actually, that wasn't hinted at in the article; I made that part up.)
But that was an accident; the vandalism was deliberate. In fact, this is the second time the statue has been vandalized; the ESPN report also mentioned an incident from back in 2007 when a dead goat was found hanging from around Harry's neck (the statue Harry, the real Harry was dead by then). This was apparently done in an attempt to remove the Billy Goat's Curse, which was placed upon the Cubs back in the 1945 World Series by the owner of the Billy Goat Tavern, a man whose name escapes me at the moment, when he was refused admittance to the park to see a game. (I don't remember all the details; look that one up, will you? And by the way, '45 was the LAST time the Cubs even appeared in the Series.)
Although I was never a big Harry fan, he did have his moments. And he had a great gig; he would announce the pre-game starting lineups, then do the first three innings, at which time whoever his "color guy" was at the time (Steve Stone and Milo Hamilton are two I remember) would take over and do the fifth, sixth and top of the seventh innings, while Harry went down into the bowels of the stadium someplace and hoisted a few cold ones. Sometime around the beginning of the seventh inning, Harry would stagger his way back to the broadcast booth to lead the crowd in the singing of "Take Me Out To The Ballgame" during the seventh inning stretch and then finish doing the game. (For those of you who never had the dubious pleasure of experiencing Harry's singing, imagine the sounds a mongoose might make if its genitals were set on fire; as a singer, Harry would have been a fine heavy equipment operator.)
So I don't understand this vandalism of his statue; I may not have been a Harry Carey fan (I always thought he was a bit of an asshole, frankly) but the people of Chicago in general, and Cubs fans in particular, loved this guy. He was, at one time, before he passed away back in the '95, as I recall, the embodiment of the Chicago Cubs/Wrigley Field experience; there was always this cachet about seeing a game in the "friendly confines" of Wrigley, sitting in the bleachers, soaking up the summer sun and lots of brewskis, etc. There had to be to get people in the stadium, because the team always sucked.
I get the goat thing; probably somebody thought that, hey, remove the curse, and the Cubs go to the World Series. Or maybe it was a sacrifice to the baseball gods. But spray-painting the word "Sox" over Harry's face, what's that all about? What, some crazed Sox fan wanted to rub it in a little that their team won the Series as recently as '03? I mean, why bother? The Cubs haven't won the World Series since '08; NINETEEN oh eight. So you wanted to make their fans feel bad about their team? Come on, if you're a fan of a franchise that hasn't won a championship in their sport in over ONE HUNDRED AND THREE YEARS, how much worse can someone make you feel by reminding you the other franchise in town is better? There's a little (maybe a lot) of the masochist in every Cub fan, make no mistake.
I thought the remark by Eugene Levy's character in the movie "American Pie" that some vaginas look much like tropical plants was spot on, didn't you?
Love and batting averages,
PJTT
copyright 2011 Krissongs, Inc.
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